ABSTRACT
Within university literature departments…there is a constant resistance to the inclusion of modern works to study, and even when this battle is won, it doesn't necessarily help us or other writers, in that university English is a training in reading, not writing, literature. Even socialist and marxist theories of literature are formed in the university mould and are predominantly theories of criticism, of texts mainly from the past…a concentration on literature as tradition, as a mode of cultural consumption, is damaging because it rarely focusses on the question of the production of contemporary literature—how the literature of today is getting produced and is going to get produced, by whom, in what conditions and with what support.
